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It was a sunny summer day in August of 2009 as I sat in a conference room at Roger William’s University’s Providence campus, feeling somewhat like a guinea pig. I was a member of the first class of RWU Law’s Immigration Law Clinic. A few months prior, I had submitted my application and thoughtfully explained my interest in the immigration field. My family’s past – a story of immigration fortunes and misfortunes – was a natural starting point. I often imagined how my ancestors had moved from Africa to the United States, and from China to the West Indies, and how both sides eventually settled...

This Friday, March 27, an extraordinary gathering will take place here at RWU Law to discuss mass incarceration and mass probation -- one of the most important public policy issues of our time.
A sizeable cross-section of the Rhode Island community – including members of the bench and bar, law professors and law students, local and national experts, a host of stakeholders and citizens – will come together for a timely symposium titled “Sounding the Alarm on Mass Incarceration: Moving Beyond the Problem and Toward Solutions.” The event calls upon us to reexamine an inordinately expensive...

It doesn’t take long for my contract drafting students to realize that drafting is not the mechanical, backroom exercise of a wordsmith. The students quickly start to see each business transaction as its own human interest story of parties forging a positive, fruitful contractual platform to boost and cushion their deal as the real world plays out. In the first class, students learn how to elicit the client’s chief goals and concerns so that the contract actually addresses them. They learn what a lawyer needs to know and think about before ever putting pen to paper, and...

Members of the RWU Law’s Association for Public Interest Law (APIL) started Alternative Spring Break (ASB) during spring break 2006, as an opportunity to assist those recovering from the devastation caused when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005. Since its inception, ASB has continued to grow every year. In its first year, there was just one placement and a handful of dedicated students. Now, in 2015, it has grown to 17 placements in eight different states with 58 student participants. Many of our supervising attorneys are RWU Law alumni. The program is funded by a...

Excellent lawyers are committed to lifelong learning; our craft requires it. Whenever a new client walks into a lawyer’s office, that lawyer faces a new challenge. This challenge always includes new facts to learn, and a new problem to solve. This problem may add a new wrinkle to a familiar area of law, or may require the lawyer to become familiar with an entirely new area of law, or both.
Training students to learn the skills needed to represent these future clients, and to confidently embrace the unique challenge that each client’s problem raises, is at the heart of...

On the evening of January 15, 2015, Oklahoma prisoner Charles Warner died by lethal injection, shortly after the Supreme Court denied his application for a stay of execution. Warner had also filed a petition for certiorari, in which he argued that the lethal injection protocol used by Oklahoma violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Eight days after Warner was executed, the Court granted the petition for certiorari in his case.
How could the Court refuse to stay a man’s execution and then, just a few days later, agree to hear the merits of his...

In recent years, our administration and faculty have worked hard to enhance the school’s practical and experiential learning opportunities in an effort to help our students become practice ready by graduation. We now have six clinical externships, three in-house clinics, and even a Semester in Practice Program, which allows students to immerse themselves in a semester-long work experience during the second or third year of school.
These changes have required flexibility by all members of the school’s faculty and staff, including those of us in the Academic Success Department....

The nation needs the kind of debate it had during the 1912 presidential election. Believe it or not, one of the principal campaign topics involved antitrust law. All four candidates – Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft, and Eugene Debs – spoke about antitrust on the campaign trail.
And the public listened with keen interest. There was then strong public sentiment that gigantic corporations, then called “trusts,” were harming the nation.
The two leading candidates, Wilson and Roosevelt, offered different solutions. Wilson argued that giant corporations turned rugged individuals...

On Wednesday, February 4, 2015, I’ll be interviewing Donald Verrilli, Jr., the Solicitor General of the United States, in an event that’s been billed as a “Fireside Chat.” Those looking to find warmth in these winter months may be disappointed that there will be no actual fire, only a lot of chat. Since I have no experience doing public interviewing, I’m guessing that I was chosen because in 1996, in my first real job as a lawyer, I had the good fortune to work as a Bristow Fellow in the Solicitor General’s Office.
The Solicitor General is responsible for all litigation on behalf of the...

Our annual Public Interest Auction is right around the corner – on January 30th at the Providence Biltmore! It’s a one-of-a-kind event that is not to be missed.
Each year we bring together our students, alumni, faculty, staff, and the Providence legal community for an evening of elegance that celebrates our students and alumni dedicated to serving low-income and disenfranchised communities in New England and around the country. The event raises funds for RWU Law’s many public interest programs, including our Public Interest Summer Stipend Program, Alternative Spring Break, and...